Summary

In this chapter, I took a closer look at Docker images and containers. Images are packaged applications, and containers are instances of an application, run from an image. You can use containers to do simple fire-and-forget tasks, you can work with them interactively, or have them running in the background. As you start to use Docker more, you'll find yourself doing all three.

The Dockerfile is the source to build an image. It's a simple text file with a small number of instructions to specify a base image, copy files, and run commands. You use the Docker command-line tool to build an image, which is very easy to add as a step to your CI build. When a developer pushes code that passes all the tests, the output of the build will be a versioned Docker image, which you can deploy to any host knowing that it will always run in the same way.

I looked at a few simple Dockerfiles in this chapter, and finished with a real-world application. NerdDinner is a legacy ASP.NET MVC app that was built...